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I (Dries007) have recently taken over as main developer and server admin. This involved moving servers to reduce cost. It's likely there will be some more downtime in the future but most things should be sorted by now. This forum is in dire need of replacement as the software is quite old and can't be easily updated. If you wish to discuss or stay updated, join our discord: https://invite.gg/terrafirmacraft. The forum will remain available to read, but will be locked in the future, when a new system is setup. The forum and wiki are now ad free. If you'd like to contribute to keeping it that way, you can do so via paypal or patreon.

Personally I'm fine with things as they are. I know there was discussion on discord of getting rid of/compressing the bottom layer, and maybe even the middle layer. I think it'd be a mistake to get rid of the middle layer, but the bottom layer I could see going away. But to me part of the great fun of minecraft and tfc is the mining and exploring underground. TFC was flawed for a couple reasons:
A) the cave-in mechanic made mining and exploring unattractive, because hidden caves would collapse as you got near them. So when you finally found them and broke in, it was a terrible landscape of cobble and destroyed ore. This was very not-fun. TFC1.12 needs to arrange it such that natural caves and overhangs have the blocks on the bottom set to not be vulnerable to cave-in, EXCEPT if the player is using powder kegs. Then all bets are off. That would allow the player to find the cave in it's natural state, and explore it. I don't know exactly how that gets done. In my mind, caves are 'hollowed' out of solid rock in world gen, so maybe every cave air block checks above itself and if there's stone there, then it sets a flag on that stone that it's 'caveroof', hence not subject to digging cave-ins, only blasting. Btw make blasting more effective. It was never as powerful as described in the TFC wiki.
B ) The bottom layer offered nothing different from the top layer. The bottom layer needs to have ores that only occur there or occur there in much greater quantities, or with greater liklihood of the vein being rich. I would actually love to see lava not occur on the surface anymore, but only at the bottom of the world, in extensive lava caverns with extra-deadly mobs. This would make sulfur an actual resource of some worth. Diamonds could start as very sparse vertical 'pipes', similar to hot springs, but not a solid line. These would lead to the main deposit at the bottom layer. There needs to be a reason to go to the bottom layer, and there needs to be some more threatening mobs down there to make those resources more dangerous to get.
Anything more above ground isn't of a lot of interest to me, because any ores up there are easy to get. Just dig them right from the side of a mountain. I've always found 100 blocks to be plenty of build height.
All that said, I would totally support getting rid of the bottom and even the middle stone layer IF a mining 'dimension' is created. So at the bottom of the regular world, randomly scattered about at bedrock, would be portals that are made to look like tunnel mouths. These would teleport you to another dimension that story-wise is just deeper stone. It'd basically be the nether, but with regular stone rather than netherrack and fortresses. and such. Then you'd have an entire world of mining to do, and it could have even more unique mobs and environments. Giant mushrooms in the huge underground caves. The way the nether already generates is already great for an underground world, just replace the blocks. But get rid of the distance warping, and the tunnels between the regular and mining worlds need to be in the same locations in each world. And the nether ones need to appear at the very top of the mining world, in the upper bedrock. And btw, the tunnel from the normal world starts blocked. The player has to blast it open with a full barrel of gunpowder. And there you have an actual use for gunpowder in the game. I'd further suggest that if the mining dimension were a thing, that surface deposits be only poor and normal ore, with normal being much rarer - maybe 20%. And the mining dimension having the full spectrum of ores. This would give strong incentive to actually go mining and adventuring underground, which would improve the mod greatly imo.
Edit: and I very much agree on swamps btw. I hated how they were just large ponds in plains in TFC. Bioxx was doing them much better in TFC2, where they were full of blocks in the water to make them harder to cross, and lots of reeds and willows. I really hope TFC1.12 makes swamps actually swampy.

Original TFC (v1.7.10) is dead. Bioxx had started to develop TFC2, but that is in limbo now, and also it's rather different from original TFC. Some community members have taken it upon themselves to make a 1.12+ version of TFC, but that is in a very early stage.

Yes that's correct, in one of the final versions there was a config. And yes, of course they die in cold weather. There was a pretty significant swath of the world though, which never froze, and was easy street as far as food goes. In practice I think servers is where you *want* immortal crops, due to time passing while players are absent. So they were the least forgiving. But there's other options. You could have crops simply start over again when they reach a certain age. That would make them a little less reliable in mild climates, as far as an easy-mode ready to go food source.

Well, a true feast or famine is like rock salt or flux stone. You have 0, or you have an infinite amount. So it goes from being that valuable commodity you want very badly, to being an infinite commodity that is essentially value-less. This is bad for the game regardless (imagine if you could find entire biomes of copper or iron). The clay situation in 1.7.10 isn't truly that, it's just a resource similar to others - present some places, not in others - but the immediate starting need means it shouldn't be entirely missing in large areas, except maybe deserts. Even a newb could pretty easily logically come to the conclusion that deserts don't have clay, and decide to either accept the challenge, or roll a new world.
It is nice to know there'll be some 'out of the box' server options built in this time. Please build in some kind of merchant support!

Ya, that was actually another discord topic. Bunsan Had a question on peoples' thoughts on the temperature gradient and in the course of that it turned to how it affects preservation. I am of the opinion that being able to infinitely preserve food simply by storing your food in an environmentally cold area makes other preservation methods less useful, and so hurts the potential preservation tech tree, and that I'd rather see ambient temperature not affect it at all. Counterpoint was that on servers it's good to have a no-maintenance permanent preservation, due to possible extremely long times passing while player is offline, and that's a good point.
Eventually I suggested something like what you propose gcook. Basically that items stored at freezing temps eventually become "frozen", and in that state they cannot be eaten, and the stack can neither be combined nor divided. In order to use the food the player must defrost it, which takes an amount of time commesurate with the stack size. So the player now has a choice of whether to store efficient giant stacks of food that take forever to defrost, or many small stacks that they can defrost and use quicker, but that take a lot of storage space. If you've ever tried to defrost a big turkey or ham, you know it takes days. I'd suggest a stack of 64, for instance, take 4 or 5 days (2 hours per unit?). This allows the player to still have simple infinite cold storage, but requires better planning to use it. I further suggested that every time you thaw a stack, some portion of it is lost to 'freezer burn', as a deterrent to repetitive freezing and thawing. The minimum loss is 1 piece, so the smaller the stack thawed, the greater the percentage lost, which plays into the choice of freezing in large slow-thawing stacks, or small fast-thawing but high percent loss stacks.
To go with this, you'd have a 'chilled' tag or something, and this would get applied when the player uses 'constructed' cold storage that is part of the game progression - for instance ice boxes or ice houses or refrigerators, etc. chilled items would be useable immediately, rather than having to be defrosted.
Items that are neither chilled nor frozen simply don't have a tag.
Immortal crops are the other big killer of preservation use, but that's a separate topic, and more easily addressed I think.

There was some interesting discussion regarding food decay yesterday on the discord, so I wanted to kind of compile some of it in this post so it doesn't get lost to discord history. It's been stated that TFC1.12 won't have the original tfc food quantities - it'll just use stacks of pieces as regular MC. Hence, there will also be no trimming. I don't think anyone will be sad to see trimming go. Basically 3 options are presented:
The most obvious perhaps, would be ARK-style, where the top piece of a stack is always decaying on a timer. So if the normal decay time for vegetables is 5 minutes, after 5 minutes the top piece of the stack is removed. A visual changing of the background of the food icon indicates the time until next decay. This is what TFC2 was going for in the last iteration, and it's a pretty well known system I think.
@Bunsan presented another option: "The thing to remember is that in 1.7.10 it did not care how old the food was, it just cared how long since last trim and how much decay is present. So that is effectively the same as having each item have a set chance to decay and then have it roll to decay every X number of ticks. Whether it just goes poof or turns into a decay item doesn't matter." So basically that seemed to be suggesting that every piece of food in the inventory has a chance to decay every tick. Which has the same statistical result as Ark style probably, in that statistically, per time period, you'll lose just 1 piece. Sometimes maybe a bit more, sometimes less. But statistically same result. There's no icon background timer in this method, so on the one hand you aren't constantly nagging at the back of the player's mind with a visual reminder as each piece of food disappears. But at the same time, it's a somewhat less predictable system. Some people may actually appreciate the defined rate of decay in ARK style.
@TonyLiberatto presented another idea. As I understand it, his idea is that when you harvest or create food, it is marked with an 'expiration date', which presumably will show in the tooltip. Expiration dates are only to the day, not the hour. So a carrot harvested at 1am of a given day will have the same expiration date as one harvested at 11pm. Stacks of the same item with different expiration dates would not automatically stack. When the stack reaches the expiration date, the entire stack vanishes or turns to rot or whatever. SO in this system there is no constant drip of food disappearing. You have it all available until the expiration date, and then it's all gone. This is arguably a bit more realistic in that for most food, it does not immediately start having parts go bad. I don't know if maybe it has some processor overhead advantage, in that you'd only check the food once a day, at a certain time, rather than having to check every X ticks?
The more I think on it, the more I like Tony's system, and I wanted to expand upon it a bit. I think you could still allow manual combining of stacks to avoid too much clutter, but perhaps just inherit the lower expiration, to avoid hijinks with averaging. This way the player can choose between less space used, and keeping a higher expiration date on some. This also opens up a possible avenue for containers that are food-specialized, having many slots but only for food (in some cases maybe just certain kinds). These containers allow the player to store many stacks of food with different expirations. I also think this system might discourage people like me, from leaving crops in the ground forever in non-freezing climates and harvesting them when needed (though hopefully that won't be a thing anyway) since that would probably result in either more clutter or more wastage, vs. harvesting large amounts at once and properly preserving.
Another possibility I think expiration dates would open up, is for there to be food poisoning effects. So your food is safe for some percentage of it's life - maybe the first 50 to 75% - but thereafter the background color changes (maybe to orange) and you get an increasing chance that if you eat this food, you'll get food poisoned or catch a disease or something. Preserving the food might nullify that chance (the background is normal all the way to expiration) or it might delay it (only turns orange at 90% of expiration, and also the chance does not get as high due to reduce poison window).
You could even do a sort of hybrid system. Maybe the food doesn't decay for the first 40% of it's expiration date, but upon reaching 40% it gets orange background and starts to decay ark style or random style or whatever, but still no poison chance. But at 70% of expiration it turns red, and now it is not only decaying, but you also have the poisoning chance. So there the player gets a window with no decay, but then there's a significant window with decay, and at the tail end poisoning.
So ya, in the end I rather like Tony's system and think it presents some good hooks for other mechanics.

Oh I agree about the exploration and the search, but I'd suggest that the resources that you need basically day 1 are not great candidates for complete exclusion from entire biomes. I think upper tier ores and such are much better for that. Reducing dry biomes is a possible way to address the clay factor for sure, though I'm also kind of hoping deserts are more common and extensive. Is it possible to prevent the player from spawning in dry biomes? If selected spawn rainfall is below X, select a new spawn? Difficulty levels where the player can choose to start in a harder starting biome if they want? Or at least a popup if the player starts in a dry spawn, that explains to them that they won't find clay in the biome?

- Will there be mining collapse? If so, will it be fixed so that natural caves don't collapse? This really killed the fun of caving in TFC1. Also, will the collapse mechanic be simplified so that collapses that start outside the supported area don't propagate into a supported area? This function frustrated and confused many people, and I know that there are people who specifically dropped the mod because of it.
- Will clay be fixed so that at least some occurs in dry biomes, so that you don't end up with newbs confused why they're not finding clay in their spawn area?
@Bunsan Hopefully these do not come across as 'suggestive' FAQ questions. I do think it's very relevant to a great many people, who may have dropped the mod because of some of the very poor design choices in TFC1 (feast/famine resources) but also some who just have preference differences (collapse mechanics). I do understand if you delete my response to Dries re: flux.

The old clay situation makes for a poor gameplay experience for new players. I watched a great many lps of people who started in dry biomes, and they're hunting around for clay, not understanding why they can't find it. These kind of feast/famine mechanics are just bad game design - it's the kind of thing that turns new players off. Mia's idea of having limited clay deposits even in dry biomes is a good one, and I would definitely vote for it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/tfcplus/ Basically dunk is taking 1.7.10 TFC and making some relatively minor changes. The upside is it's playable now I think, since the changes are minor. However in the long run, if the 1.12 port succeeds, I think TFC+ will end up obsolete.